This invention relates to the field of searchable digital libraries. More specifically, this invention relates to the method for tagging both text and multimedia objects in a student project with regard to goals attained and quality of their attainment.
A portfolio is a collection of work. For our purposes, this work is done by an author, e.g. a student, and is reviewed by one or more evaluators, e.g. a teacher and/or others, to assess the work, e.g. the progress of the student in learning a particular subject. Most of the prior art has dealt with hard copy portfolios. However, modern approaches use digital representations of work/portfolios.
The field of digital portfolios is a relatively new one. The concept of using portfolios of student work as part of student evaluations was described in Theodore Sizer""s 1988 book, xe2x80x9cHorace""s Compromise.xe2x80x9d In this book, Sizer describes the dilemma of a typical high school teacher in attempting to teach and evaluate students with wide ranges of abilities using classical teaching methods. He proposes the concept of student portfolios of work to replace the more rigid concepts of numerical or letter grades.
The Coalition of Essential Schools at Brown University has published some early work where scanned and computer generated documents are displayed as student works, and where teacher comments can be filed alongside the original documents. The Authentic Convergence Assessment Technologies proposed a product based on this xe2x80x9cCoalitionxe2x80x9d approach called xe2x80x9cPersona Plusxe2x80x9d. This product proposed to store student work in a database, where it could be recalled for evaluation by parents, teachers and others. It does not suggest annotation.
These approaches concern a multimedia display of one or more portfolios, made up of individual student projects where each project may contain text documents, as well as sound, graphics, and other multimedia clips. Such a portfolio could consist of a collection of files stored on various computer servers connected into a network.
Annotation of data files is generally known. Annotation of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) data files used by World World Web (WWW) viewers is supported by the freeware Mosaic browser and a few others. Some browsers have had the capability of associating comments with these portfolios. However, such annotation is always stored locally on a single user""s computer and does not become part of the original material in any way.
Prior art digital portfolios have dealt with student portfolios as if they were hard copy portfolios of a student""s work. The teacher""s commentary is encapsulated in a group of computer files rather than in a form where computer searching and reporting of such work may be possible. However, since the student portfolio is typically scanned text, there is no easy way to draw a correlation between the teacher""s comments and particular points in that scanned text.
Most of the prior art has not disclosed a way to annotate student work in digital portfolios according to one or more predetermined measurements/standards, e.g. teacher""s evaluations, educations goals, etc. Furthermore, most of the prior art does not disclose the processing of evaluation data or generating reports involving these measurements/standards.
Without annotations that conform to predetermined standards, it is difficult to accurately and effectively compare documents in a large work portfolio from one student and/or work in portfolios from a large number of students, e.g., with respect to those students and standards in other school districts.
Therefore, the prior art has difficulty processing information about large numbers of digital portfolios and comparing an individual student performance to a large group of students based on these standards. The prior art also has difficulty comparing documents of a student""s work against their own previous work and relating the student""s work to outside standards and/or students in other locations (e.g. school districts).
Further, this inability to process a large number of digital portfolios, with respect to predetermined standards, further makes it difficult to assess the performance of individual teachers, schools, and/or school systems.
In sum, the prior art graphical user interfaces (GUIs) used in networks dealing with digital portfolios do not have an easy to use technology to enable teachers (and/or other evaluators) to annotate student (author) work according to a predetermined set of (educational) standards and to evaluate and compare student (author) work based on those educational standards.
An object of this invention is an improved system and method for marking elements of an author""s (student""s) work directly with measurable, standardized (educational) goals and evaluator comments (e.g. teacher comments and other comments such as those from parents.)
An object of this invention is an improved system and method for creating a digital portfolio of author""s (student""s or other worker""s) projects and for generating reports from that portfolio based on predetermined standards.
Another object of this invention is a system for generating reports, with optional weighting factors, regarding the number of goals which one or more authors (student) or groups of authors has achieved in one or more projects.
Another object of this invention is a network environment that is used to display, on a client workstation, author (student) portfolios that have been annotated by an evaluator according to a predetermined set of standards.
This invention is a system and method that provides a visual metaphor for tagging documents with various types of (education) commentary to an author""s (student""s) work and indication of (educational) goals that have been or are to be achieved. One or more of the comments and goals are based on predetermined standards.
In an alternative preferred embodiment, the invention drags goals and commentary phrases from a list of (customized/predetermined) goals or comments, optionally assigns a weight to each, and stores these as tags hidden within the document and attached to a project element (e.g. a phrase, a picture, or a multimedia clip). The goals and comments can be displayed by clicking on an indicator box using a selection device, e.g. a mouse.
Summaries of these goals can be generated to assist evaluators (teachers and administrators) in evaluating both the work of the authors (students) and the success of evaluator in managing (teaching) the authors (students.) A preferred network embodiment of the invention is disclosed.